Remember Rocktober? Now it’s Fantasy February in the garden. Was I kvetching about winter and cold? Let me take it all back. It’s a wonderful time. You get to huddle inside with a pile of seed magazines or an internet connection and do no work and produce no sweat, nor must you commit to any huge expenses of time, energy or money. Not quite yet, at least!

So I’m dreaming of a potager and drooling over pictures of shrieking neon Swiss chard. A potager is a French kitchen garden, traditionally set out in square raised beds in groups of four with access on all four sides. Then you typically put some garden bling, like a birdbath or obelisk, at the intersection of the crossing paths, and play all sorts of color-matching tic-tac-toe games with what you plant. The four-square design lets you play color games with square-foot gardening – for example, planting red lettuce in exactly the same square foot across the aisle from another square foot of red lettuce. Or alternate so that red-green-red faces green-red-green. The main idea is to grow vegetables not just to eat, but to delight the eye. It’s an English cottage garden, but built of edibles instead of flowers. And you put it right out back of the kitchen door. Easy pickin’s, as they say.

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Now wouldn’t these babies just wake your eyeballs up in the morning when you went out to water or weed? This is Five-Color Silverbeet Swiss Chard, from Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa (seedsavers.org)

Of course, said fantasy potager will require weeks of work to build, buying new gravel, raised-bed corner braces, ripping out the old weed-ridden gravel bed back to the defunct and useless weed barrier, and other major reworkings of the corner into which I hope to tuck it into. And of course, it will involve suffering through the hope/worry cycle about whether that corner – surrounded by fence on two sides and a shed on the other, but utterly open to the south, will get enough light to grow anything.

Practicality be damned. Odd-colored veggies are a huge motivator for me. I’m thinking about some Blacktail Mountain melons, a variety developed in Idaho that’s small, sweet, and has eggplant-colored skin. (It’s also said to shrug off our chilly spring nights.) And striped eggplant and scarlet carrots and lemon-yellow round cukes. Because with limited space, if a garden’s not going to indulge your sense of the whimsical and bizarre, why have it? Perhaps a jalapeno named “False Alarm” that I read about years ago — because it’s red and mild and a little bit sweet. Anything that toys with expectations, pops the eye, adapts to our climate and still tastes good, that’s for me — like maybe this knockout Listada de Gandia Eggplant, also from Seed Savers, who were kind enough to share their photos:

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And perhaps a tidy little round zucchini. Yes, I know, “little zucchini” – what an oxymoron! I grew the regular kind for the first time in years last summer, and produced my weight and possibly over it in squash. I would blink, and I’d have a 15-pounder lying there innocently in the shade of the enormous stickery leaves. “Who, me? I didn’t balloon to the size of a Volkswagen while you weren’t looking,” they seemed to say. “My growth rate is perfectly normal.”

Last September at the farmer’s market, in a moment of supreme denial that back home in the garden lurked five monster alien squash planning world domination, I became charmed by a round, pale green little zuke. Bought it and took it on a camping trip. Fried it up with a poblano and some chicken-apple sausage and then melted some Windsor Dairy cheese over it. It was a mellow, sweet little squash, though I’ve since found that it was outsize for its variety (supposedly you shouldn’t let them get bigger than a baseball), so it shouldn’t have been quite that yummy. Maybe it was the fresh air of Mesa Verde and the fact that I’d driven all the previous day and had decided to have a slow morning and make myself a big ol’ hearty breakfast. But it was absolutely the best breakfast of the trip – and possibly of that year.

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The name of this non-intimidating squash that has captured my soul and my palatte? Rond de Nice, available, among other sources, from Vermont Bean Seed Co. (vermontbean.com). A sweet round little name. A nice, humble little veggie from Nice.

Becky Hensley is the co-founder of Share Denver - a community craft space in Park Hill. She's also the proud Ninja-in Chief of the Denver Craft Ninjas -- a women’s crafting collective dedicated to keeping the DIY spirit alive through laughter, shared skills, and cocktails.

Colorado native Mark Montano is an international designer, artist, author and television personality. He has appeared on TLC’s “While You Were Out” and “10 Years Younger,” as well as “My Celebrity Home” on the Style Network, “She’s Moving In” on We TV, “The Tony Danza Show” on ABC, and “My Home 2.0” on Fox.